I purchased the Asus M3A78-EMH HDMI and tried using an x2 6400+. My first problem lay with a sound emmiting from the motherboard. It was a high pitched whine, not loud but annoying. I have seen other people with the same problem. It seems that at any time there is any type of activity accessing the hard drive, even the slightest activity, the whining would start.

The second problem was poor graphics acceleration. Using windowblinds (change the look of XP to Vista), when I right click the start button (orb), the background icons on the desktop would disappear for 2-3 seconds and then the menu would appear. The delay did not make sense.

At first I thought that maybe it was the CPU cause it is not listed on Asus' website as a supported CPU (but it IS supported by the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H). I swapped out the CPU and tried a x2 5600+, x2 4800+ and a x2 4400+ with the same issues (all these cpu's are supported by both Gigabyte and Asus).

I swapped in different memory (corsair and mushkin) and still the same problem. Something is just not right with this chipset.

Note* All these processors and different memories were also tried on an Asus M2A-VM. There was no graphics slowdown, pausing or whining of anykind on this board. It was extremely stable, faster and snappier than both the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H and Asus M3A78-EMH HDMI.

My last resort was to place a dedicated video card, an old nvidia 7300gs. Once I swapped in the card the problems were gone. No delay whatsoever but the whining did remain.

Both motherboards, Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H and Asus M3A78-EMH HDMI suffer from a high pitched whine and slow grapics, but the gigabyte boards whine is not as much as the Asus.

My question(s) is this, who else is suffering from this?

Is there a problem with the video chipset that the board has that should be rma'd?

Try a different PSU to fix the high pitched noise! I have had a similar issue with my box (ASUS MB and AMD XP2400+) and it started when replacing a broken PSU (there were no noise issues with the old one). My box is emitting a high pitched noise all the time except when hard disk is very active. This was even more audible (over the earphones) when using earphones connected to the sound card but I managed to get rid of most of that by ticking the "Mute" box for the CD-ROM in the mixer. The whine from the box itself has not changed though...

I suspect this is due to the cheap and nasty PSU and cabling/MB grounding issues.